The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of information that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, which means that the server executing the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process the data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a cloud web hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backup copies more quickly and on less disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover any kind of content that you may have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is much better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to store several daily backups of your files and databases.